Atlas Italiae - Special Edition 1

In this atlas Silvia Camporesi has collected her innovative and unique views of Italy that embody the various meanings of a wider artistic and anthropological reflection on her country’s identity. A country in a difficult historical time marked by failures, declines, second thoughts and the longing for change. Her research poses questions on the future by orienting the lens at the most hidden and less visible parts of our history. A lens that penetrates into the interstices of the past, backlighting the potential soul of the Italian landscape, an indefinite state in-between the “not being anymore and not yet being” that is typical of contemporary times. On first flipping through the photographs of this book we discover the incredible ghost towns which tell us about a country that resists and survives despite the illusionary stagnation of the present, about the silent and invisible action of time that replaces the action of mankind, of its amnesia and blindness, lending a different kind of beauty which is unthinkable of in the digital world. Permeated by poetry and metaphysics of the sublime, Silvia Camporesi’s photographs capture the essence of the ghost towns and objects not as a trace of an announced death, but as the promise of a different kind of life, one which doesn’t just express itself through the digital aura of a society multiplied and modified by technology. In the discovery of worlds that flee and hide from a video presence, the landscape finally arises for what it really is: a form of knowledge of the intimate value of our history.

(M. Paderni, from Atlas Italiae, Peliti editore)